David Clark ’66

David Clark ’66 was awarded the Oxford Internet Institute Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his contributions to the advancement of the Internet. Clark, a senior research scientist with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, articulated some of the basic design principles of the Internet—principles that specify how the functions and components of the Internet should be organized and arranged. Clark and two colleagues co-wrote a 1981 paper outlining a key principle, sometimes called the end-to-end argument, which states that, wherever possible, functions should be moved out of the core of the network to the attached computers at the endpoints. This approach allowed new applications running over the Internet to be more easily implemented and deployed. From 1981 to 1989, he was chief protocol architect of the Internet and chaired the committee charged with oversight of its technical and engineering development.

Currently, Clark is researching the redefinition of the architectural underpinnings of the Internet and the relation of technology and architecture to economic, societal, and policy considerations.